More Than Half of Male College Athletes Admit to Coercing a Partner Into Sex, One Study Finds

A new study of 379 college men found that more than half of athletes and a more than 38 percent of non-athletes admitted to coercing a partner into sex.

Researchers surveyed male college students from one large, public, Division I university in the Southeast and asked about a list of sexually coercive behaviors — including threatening partners into oral or anal sex — almost all of which met the legal definition of rape. Researchers admit that surveying men from only one college limited the study, which was published in the journal Violence Against Women last week; they asked four other universities to participate, but they each declined, they told the Washington Post.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

A disturbing pattern emerged. Men who admitted to coercive sex acts tended to agree with two specific attitudes: the belief in rape myths, like "If a woman doesn't fight back, it isn't rape," and a traditional view of gender roles, such as "Women should worry less about their rights and more about becoming good wives and mothers." (Interestingly, this language was taken from a survey developed back in 1973, which suggests that men's attitudes toward women haven't shifted as much as we'd hoped in the past 40 years.)

Most Popular

"Sports are a hypermasculine endeavor, and there's a lot that connects hypermasculinity to violence," Kristy McCray, an assistant professor of health and sport sciences at Otterbein Universtiy in Ohio, told the Washington Post.

Of course, not every college guy wants to force or trick a girl into having sex, and not every athlete is a predator. But these stats do show alarming rates of not only sexual assault and rape, but also the culture that perpetuates it. One in five women and one in 16 men will be sexually assaulted while in college, and 90 percent of those victims do not report their assault.

The Washington Post reported this news with the headline, "A shocking number of college men surveyed admit coercing a partner into sex." But as nearly 5,000 people on Twitter have pointed out through the strength of their retweets, this sad news isn't shocking at all.